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By Root 1497 0

picture. He is presumably its donor, the man for whose chapel it had been commissioned in the first place. Who is he? There is perhaps a clue in the painting’s composition. He has been aligned with a massive fluted column. The column was a symbol of the Colonna dynasty, strongly associated with the Madonna of the Rosary ever since the Battle of Lepanto, at which Costanza’s father Marcantonio had played a pivotal role. In Rome in the early 1570s, Filippo Neri had attributed victory there to the prayers of the faithful to the Madonna of the Rosary. Various names have been proposed for the donor, including that of Don Marzio Colonna, who had sheltered Caravaggio after his flight to the Alban Hills. But since the commission of the painting remains entirely undocumented, his precise identity remains a mystery.

For whatever reason, the picture had disappointed the man in the lace ruff. Whoever he was, he had turned it down, and so it appeared on the open market in Naples in the autumn of 1607. By that time it was in the hands of two minor painter-dealers, Abraham Vinck and Louis Finson, whose stock also contained the now lost Judith and Holofernes. It is not clear whether they had purchased these works or whether they were selling them on commission on the painter’s behalf. It was Finson and Vinck who told Frans Pourbus that The Madonna of the Rosary would cost the Duke of Mantua 400 ducats, which happens to be exactly in line with the fee Caravaggio had received for the Seven Acts. But the deal must have fallen through, because in the end the dealers themselves kept hold of the painting. Finson subsequently took it to Aix-en-Provence and then Antwerp, where he died in 1617.34 The Madonna of the Rosary would eventually become part of the royal collection of the Viennese Habsburgs, and is nowadays to be seen in Vienna’s Kunsthistorisches Museum. It is a key picture in the transmission of Caravaggio’s style to northern Europe. But one particular chapter in its history introduces the crucial role that would be played in that process by another great artist.

In 1620 or shortly afterwards the picture was bought from the heirs of Finson and Vinck and donated to the principal Dominican church in Antwerp by a group of painters and connoisseurs. It would remain there for more than a hundred and fifty years.35 The archives of the Dominican Fathers of Antwerp record that the most celebrated Flemish painter of the seventeenth century, Peter Paul Rubens, was a driving force behind the bequest: ‘The large painting … now in the chapel above the altar, is a work of Michelangelo da Caravaggio and was given by various art lovers, including among others, Rubens, Bruegel, Van Bael, Cooymans. Seeing that they could acquire this extraordinary great work of art for a good price, they bought it out of affection for the chapel and to have in Antwerp a rare art work …’36

Rubens was a middle-aged man in the early 1620s, but he had been deeply impressed by Caravaggio’s work from the start of his career. Like many other artists from northern Europe, he had travelled to Rome in his youth, forty years before, to study the art of classical antiquity and the Renaissance. While he was there he had been struck, as if by the force of revelation, by Caravaggio’s Roman altarpieces. The violence and drama of the works of Rubens’s early maturity, such as The Massacre of the Innocents, would be deeply touched by Caravaggio’s influence. Through Rubens, that influence would be transmitted to Flanders and Holland, where an entire school known simply as ‘the Caravaggisti’ would come into being. The development of Rembrandt’s subtle, shadowy realism would be part of the same story, which can ultimately be traced all the way back to the time of Caravaggio’s first visit to Naples, and Rubens’s early encounter with his pictures in Rome. In 1607, within just a few months of Pourbus’s negotiations on behalf of the Gonzaga to buy The Madonna of the Rosary – the very picture that Rubens, over a decade later, would help donate to the Dominicans in Antwerp – Rubens himself was